On the day of Kim Jong-il’s funeral
North Koreans openly wept on television.
They flailed in state issued uniforms
grasping each other’s arms.
A haze of snowflakes
dusted their shoulders before melting into water.
The YouTube videos
looked as if the procession,
snaking through the streets ofPyongyang
had taken place in the 1980s.
They are flat, icy, the color of an albino’s eyes
textured only by melodrama.
Thousands of identical women
incessantly sobbing, falling to their knees
as the polished black hearse,
glistening with droplets of rain, slowly drove by.
The herds of people –
undulating black flesh –
like the skin of an eel
stretched across neighborhoods.
A grandmother shoved a handkerchief
into her left nostril.
The footage is poorly edited.
Newspapers wondered if he would be buried
or put on display like a sausage in a deli case.
Now, there is a fish shortage inNorth Korea
and starvation is a constant static
in the bellies of children.
Stoves remain cold.
Dinner tables sit barren.
His son Kim Jong-un
walks an isle of food
in a pristine new grocery store
stark and fluorescent.
He admires the cases of fish;
their scales shimmer like ornaments.
On the radio inAmerica
a Korean man tells a story
about a mother and father
who had nothing left to sell.
The rooms of their home
lifeless, without a rug or a chair or a toy.
They managed to get some rice
and cooked it in a cast iron pot,
boiled it until it floated
like a sheet of ice on top of an ocean.
The children scooped large handfuls
shoved it into their tiny mouths,
chewed it with complete gratification,
felt it fill their deflated stomachs,
unaware of the rat poison
used as seasoning.
North Koreans openly wept on television.
They flailed in state issued uniforms
grasping each other’s arms.
A haze of snowflakes
dusted their shoulders before melting into water.
The YouTube videos
looked as if the procession,
snaking through the streets of
had taken place in the 1980s.
They are flat, icy, the color of an albino’s eyes
textured only by melodrama.
Thousands of identical women
incessantly sobbing, falling to their knees
as the polished black hearse,
glistening with droplets of rain, slowly drove by.
The herds of people –
undulating black flesh –
like the skin of an eel
stretched across neighborhoods.
A grandmother shoved a handkerchief
into her left nostril.
The footage is poorly edited.
Newspapers wondered if he would be buried
or put on display like a sausage in a deli case.
Now, there is a fish shortage in
and starvation is a constant static
in the bellies of children.
Stoves remain cold.
Dinner tables sit barren.
His son Kim Jong-un
walks an isle of food
in a pristine new grocery store
stark and fluorescent.
He admires the cases of fish;
their scales shimmer like ornaments.
On the radio in
a Korean man tells a story
about a mother and father
who had nothing left to sell.
The rooms of their home
lifeless, without a rug or a chair or a toy.
They managed to get some rice
and cooked it in a cast iron pot,
boiled it until it floated
like a sheet of ice on top of an ocean.
The children scooped large handfuls
shoved it into their tiny mouths,
chewed it with complete gratification,
felt it fill their deflated stomachs,
unaware of the rat poison
used as seasoning.
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